PBS digs up pols 'roots'

Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of the new PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” takes VIPs Kevin Bacon, John Legend and Samuel Jackson, among others on a journey back in time, examining their roots using genealogy and family histories. The series premieres Sunday, March 25.

But Gates, given his close connections in Washington (remember the beer summit at the White House in 2009?), managed to book some politicos as well, including Rep. John Lewis, Newark (N.J.) Mayor Cory Booker and Condoleezza Rice.

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For Lewis and Booker, the process revealed previously unknown parts of their past. In fact, Lewis was brought to tears by what he found out.

“I learned that my great-great-grandfather registered to vote almost 100 years, almost to the date, before I registered to vote,” said Lewis (D-Ga.), an influential leader of the civil rights movement. “That was just too much. I guess it’s in my blood. I guess it’s part of my DNA to stand up and push for the involvement and the participation of all people in the political process.”

Booker learned about his father’s side of the family.

“My father was born to a single mother and really got adopted by the whole community because she had a difficult time taking care of him,” Booker told Gates. “So I’m very curious about my father’s background, and we’ve really had a hard stop, not knowing whence he came.”

Booker told POLITICO that the knowledge of his past give his public service even more meaning.

“We just opened up some homeless housing for families and knowing the kind of poverty and dislocation that was in my own history makes me realize that helping those families isn’t just a matter of public policy or charity, it’s really helping yourself and two generations down the line. If my father’s mother, who was a single mother, if she didn’t get the help and support that she needed, I wouldn’t be here today.”

And yet, roots can also have a way of becoming politicized, as happened with the “birthers” questioning President Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship.

“People can try to pervert the truth of other people’s past and twist it for their own petty, political benefit, and that’s always going to be a concern and a risk,” Booker said. “But I think, ultimately, by revealing the majesty of each other’s histories … you see how connected we all are. From my personal experience, having somebody that fought in the Alabama Creek Wars that basically fought to remove Native Americans from their land and having Native American blood in me, having slaves and a Confederate soldier, having early British settlers and people taken from Africa really helps me feel this oneness of our culture. I hope our history always matters. I hope that we always are confronting it, being exposed to it, to the full depth of it, the complications of it, the challenges of it.”

Lewis said, “If anything, I think the day will come when people won’t look at where people come from, the history of their culture, of the race. I think the day will come when we’ll see people as human beings and not someone who’s a son or daughters of former slaves, as someone from Africa or of African heritage or Irish or Italian and we’ll just be citizens of America and citizens of the world. And we will forget about origin and color and race.”

Rice, the former secretary of state, is also featured in one of the segments, and has her roots traced to her great-great-grandmother, Zine Rice, who was born around 1830. When Rice discovers from Gates that she is slightly more than half African, she remarks, “I’ve always thought that this is the kind of unhealed wound in America … That we have trouble talking about what really happened during slavery. We have trouble talking about the scars of that. … That’s the unspoken and the unfinished business of race in America.”